Alicia Vikander, Who Portrayed Denmark’s Queen, Is Screen Royalty

The Swedish actress Alicia Vikander in New York.CreditAlex Welsh for The New York Times

“I could stop traffic,” Alicia Vikander said, sliding out of a banquette at Koi in the Trump SoHo New York as a roomful of diners collectively paused, forks aloft, and gaped.

The Swedish actress was commenting on the safety-orange Victoria Beckham trousers adorning her whisper-thin physique. But the unintentional reference to her own ravishing physicality — the gamin bone structure, that sullen pout, those velvety fawn eyes — would not be lost on moviegoers in thrall to one of her latest creations, be it Ava, the exquisite embodiment of artificial intelligence in “Ex Machina”; Gaby Teller, the Courrèges-mod ’60s spy in “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” due later this summer; or Vera Brittain, the protofeminist British pacifist in “Testament of Youth,” opening Friday.

Ms. Vikander, 26, is mired in what they call a Moment. Designers want to dress her, as witnessed by the Nicolas Ghesquière couture she wore at Cannes and the Met Gala as the new face of Louis Vuitton. Women want to look like her, tracking down the European beauty brands (Hudsalva skin ointment, anyone?) said to heighten her honeyed glow.

And filmmakers want to partner her with their most bankable leading men. In her expanding list of dreamy on-screen swains: Dane DeHaan and Christoph Waltz in “Tulip Fever,” about a 17th-century Dutch love triangle; Eddie Redmayne in “The Danish Girl,” about the first man to undergo sex reassignment surgery; and Michael Fassbender (the beau whose existence she refused to confirm despite abundant circumstantial photographic evidence) in “The Light Between Oceans,” about a lighthouse-dwelling Australian couple who rescue a baby from a drifting rowboat.

How does it feel being a sensation?

“Things don’t happen overnight,” she said, leveling her fluttery gaze. Ms. Vikander’s restrained warmth can freeze over in a nanosecond when questions get uncomfortable. “It’s been three years since I’ve done some of those films, and I’m just happy that they’re going to get an audience.”

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Vera Brittain, a young woman in Britain circa 1914, gives her account of how her entire generation was consumed and irrevocably altered by the onset of World War I.Published OnApril 26, 2015CreditImage by Internet Video Archive

Opening in the Edwardian spring of 1914, “Testament of Youth,” adapted from Brittain’s canonical memoirs, recounts her coming-of-age amid the specter of World War I as she prepares for the Oxford entrance exam against her parents’ wishes. Sulking in upper-middle-class comfort in sylvan Derbyshire, she is doted on by a triumvirate of strapping boys — her brother, Edward (played by Taron Egerton), and his friends Victor Richardson (Colin Morgan) and Roland Leighton (Kit Harington) — eager to test their manhood on the front lines.

Vera supports them at first. But when Roland, their love unfurling in resplendent poetry and clandestine kisses on chaperoned outings, journeys to France, she abandons her studies and volunteers as a nurse. The seeds of Vera’s pacifism are sown while confronting a loss of such staggering magnitude that had she been writing a novel, her editor might have suggested toning it down.

“Even though I knew of the special revolution of women that happened very quickly because of the First World War, to read this young woman’s own words and to feel so connected — you know, she felt so modern,” Ms. Vikander said in a throaty British accent — one part, dialect coaches; the other, London living. During filming she carried a copy of the last letter Roland wrote to Vera. “She felt like a girl I could have a coffee with, with the same kind of ideas and thoughts that I have nowadays.”

The producer Rosie Alison, the film’s driving force, and its director, James Kent, had imagined their Vera as outspoken, candid and unapologetically romantic, and after meeting Ms. Vikander, the role was essentially hers.

“She has this wonderful determination and willfulness, and a passionate, fierce intelligence,” Ms. Alison said. “One of the things I came to admire and love about Alicia is that she’s very brave and fearless, and she’s got no vanity at all. She’s stunningly beautiful, but she doesn’t seem aware of or very interested in that. She throws herself into a role, and it’s all about the moment and the emotional authenticity of it.”

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Ms. Vikander with Armie Hammer, left, and Henry Cavill in the coming film “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”CreditDaniel Smith/Warner Bros. Pictures

“No one does tragedy like Alicia Vikander,” Mr. Kent added. “No one does pain and struggle like she does. It’s partly her eyes, which are these big, doelike wells of emotion and sadness. You feel that she’s got all this thought process going on behind them.”

The daughter of a stage actress and psychiatrist in Gothenburg, Ms. Vikander was not yet 7 when she persuaded her mother to let her audition for a musical about Swedish emigration by the creators of “Mamma Mia!” The production ran three years, with Ms. Vikander, who performed before an audience of around 1,300 twice a week, maturing into a succession of roles.

By then she had enrolled in the Royal Swedish Ballet School, moving to Stockholm on her own at 15. But the allure of the camera proved irresistible, and she withdrew from the school when administrators refused to let her take classes while shooting a television series. (They eventually relented.)

“I still love the ballet,” she said. “Any time the curtains go up, I think, ‘What if?’ and I get sucked into that world again. But then when the curtains go down, oh” — her voice wavered — “I don’t think I could have gone on and done it my entire life. In ‘Testament of Youth,’ we worked I don’t know how many hours a day, and we didn’t sleep much for two months. But I don’t think much will ever be as tough as ballet school.”

Ms. Vikander transferred her dancer’s discipline from stage to set, along with “an awareness of your body, of what transcends, of what movement reads like,” she said.

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Ms. Vikander and with Kit Harington in “Testament of Youth.”CreditLaurie Sparham/Sony Pictures Classics

At 19, just weeks before she was to begin studying law, she snared her first film lead as an unsettled young woman indelibly transformed by the strains of Mozart in Lisa Langseth’s “Pure.” She won a Guldbagge Award, Sweden’s equivalent of the Oscar, for best actress.

But it was the Oscar-nominated “A Royal Affair” (2012) that captured the attention of filmmakers beyond Scandinavia. To portray Queen Caroline Mathilda of Denmark — who succumbs to a rakish court physician while the infantile King Christian VII flounders in mental illness — she mastered Danish.

“She’s a star,” said Lionel Wigram, a producer and writer of “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” directed by Guy Ritchie. “You can’t take your eyes off her on screen or in person.”

But enough with the tragedy: The girl is a cutup. “Alicia played Gaby straight and funny at the same time, and nailed it,” Mr. Wigram said. “She began as the female interest for the two male leads, and what she became was one of the gang.”

In her late teens, Ms. Vikander auditioned for drama school and was turned down — twice — a rejection with what she now reads as a silver lining because it allowed her earlier entry into an industry that prizes youth in women.

Now she was on a publicity tour that had her scampering around the city in early May. Just the day before, she lamented, she had rambled at length about one film, only to be told at the end of her soliloquy that the question had been about another.

“People have seen the films that have come out, but they haven’t seen all the auditions and the constant tryouts and the meetings that didn’t work out,” she said, her voice barely perceptible above the lunchtime din. “For the longest time, all I wanted was to be an actor. Now I actually have a list, for when I have two or three months off, of other things I want to do.”